the East German NPA within the Pact depended, even more than it did with others, failed to materialize and there was civil commotion, starting with sabotage and violence first of all in Dresden on 11 August, it was not thought prudent to use the NPA, at least in the first instance, to suppress it. The
How different was the case of Poland. The Polish armed forces, having refused in 1970 to intervene against the near-rebellious civil population, felt obliged to take complete control of the country in 1981. It is still not clear whether General Jaruzelski imposed martial law because in his view as a Polish patriot it was the only alternative to an outright imposition of Soviet administration, or because, as a communist, he genuinely believed that Solidarity’s power was incompatible with the orderly government of the state. Whatever the answer to this riddle, the assumption of power had two effects on the Polish Army. Its manpower was deeply committed to the maintenance of internal security, and so could make less contribution to an external military operation. On the other hand, fighting West Germans might be more attractive to many Polish soldiers than repressing Solidarity. In fact they were soon to have the worst of both worlds, when it became clear that one of the Polish Army’s main roles in the war would be to prevent Polish partisans from cutting the Soviet supply lines across Polish territory into Federal Germany.
The threat to Polish national independence posed by the FRG, heavily emphasized by the Soviets, had become increasingly less credible during the 1970s. There was little else to bind Polish military interests to the USSR in its obsession with a blind hostility to NATO. The unwillingness of the Soviet military to treat their Polish colleagues as professionals of the same standing (which, at equivalent levels, they undoubtedly were) and the reluctance of Moscow to furnish the Polish Army with modern equipment did little to bridge the inevitable gap between nations that had been more often enemies than friends. On the Soviet side, moreover, the tendency of the Polish military to allow professionalism to take precedence over ideology was in the late seventies arousing increasing uneasiness.
Poland could never, therefore, have been regarded by the Soviets at that time as a wholly reliable military ally. One condition alone did more than anything else to keep Poland lined up with the Warsaw Pact plans for a swift invasion of Western Germany. This was the certainty that if Poland came out of the arrangement, a Warsaw Pact- NATO battle would be fought not on German territory but on Polish, a swift, decisive invasion of western Germany was infinitely preferable. In the event the invasion though swift was not decisive and Soviet fears about the military reliability of Polish troops were soon realized. When the Soviet lines of communication through Poland became increasingly disrupted from partisan activity, plentifully and ably supplied (though with very considerable losses) by NATO air forces, the move of Polish formations back from Germany to look after the security of communications inside Poland was a total failure The mutiny in Poznan on 17 August in one of Poland s eight mechanized division, the first formation to be sent home, for internal security duties, was the signal for a general showdown with the Soviet high Command.
In Czechoslovakia, the events of August 1968 not only put an end to all hopes of steady progress towards the eventual total identification of Czechoslovak and Soviet interests. They also virtually destroyed the Czechoslovak People’s Army (CPA).
Early hopes of a fusion between Czech and Soviet interests were never, in fact, wholly justified. It is true that the USSR could regard Czechoslovakia, in the early years of the inter-war period, as the most pro-Soviet of all its new client states. The Czechoslovak elections of 1947 were not conducted, as many have alleged, under duress from the Red Army, which was at that time quite thin on the ground in Czechoslovakia. The setting up of a communist government was in the first instance the result of a more or less respectable democratic process, if somewhat tarnished by the coup in 1948, and was, ironically enough, almost as decisive as the massive rejection of communism by the Austrians in the free elections which the Soviets had so unwisely permitted the year before. In the following years the steady re-emergence of Czech national sentiments, of anti-Soviet opinion and of restlessness with external repression of free institutions, resulted, in Dubcek’s time, in a level of dissatisfaction with Soviet hegemony too dangerous in itself and too likely to spread infection outside Czech frontiers to be disregarded.
Within the CPA there had been for at least a decade before 1968 a growing disenchantment with Soviet insistence on the total subordination of Czech interests to those of the Soviet Union, which was particularly galling to an officer corps deeply concerned for national security. Almost equally galling to military professionals was the growing intrusion of political considerations into military affairs. This was especially resented among highly qualified younger officers who often found their careers suffering from their own strong disinclination to accept Soviet doctrine, structures and interests as of unique and paramount importance in the sphere of Czechoslovak defence.
The invasion of August 1968, ordered and led by the Soviet Union but with a token inclusion of forces from other client states, tore the CPA apart. It also put an end to hitherto quite marked pro-Soviet tendencies in the country as a whole. The army never recovered, in size and professionalism, its previous standing. Up to the outbreak of war in 1985, in spite (and partly because) of persistent Soviet efforts to re-impose total Soviet control over the Czechoslovak military apparatus, the CPA could never be counted on as a wholly reliable Soviet instrument. It remained firmly tasked, none the less, to offensive action in a quick war against the West. Even before the advance slowed down, however, as a result of NATO defensive action in the Federal Republic of Germany, the mutiny which broke out in the CPA 4 Motor Rifle Division at Cheb on 17 and 18 August was predictable.
All in all the Soviet planners could not count very much on the military contribution of their Warsaw Pact allies. The purpose of the Pact was not, as in NATO, that a group of nations should pool their war efforts in a common cause. It was much simpler and more brutal.
What the Soviets wanted from the Pact was a security apparatus under their control to prevent the territory of the other members being used as a springboard or corridor for an attack on the Soviet Union. They needed a glacis, not an alliance. Both the definitions of ‘glacis’ given in the
Chapter 8: Plans for War: Politburo Debates
Major General Igor Borodin, a member of the Central Committee and of the Secretariat of the so-called Administrative Department, in effect the controlling element of the Red Army and the KGB, escaped the carnage of the last days of August 1985 in Moscow and found his way to the headquarters of VII US Corps. His debriefing at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe produced the following document (SH-003-47B-5320) dated 17 September 1985, declassified 5 June 1986.
Except in a time of crisis the Politburo would only meet once a week, on Thursdays at 3 pm, when members and candidate members assembled in the old Senate building of the Kremlin.
The Politburo was the embodiment of the Party’s absolute power over all aspects of life and society. This was somewhat disguised by cosmetic devices such as the post of President, who had no power whatsoever, and the Parliament, or Supreme Soviet, which ratified every Politburo decision unanimously and whose members were appointed from amongst the most devoted Party officials and could be replaced without any difficulty. There was no doubt at all where real power lay.
The agenda for a normal Politburo session were drafted several months in advance by the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee and then approved by the Politburo members. The Secretariat of the Central Committee prepared and distributed all necessary material in good time, besides summoning people required to furnish information, such as ministers, marshals and generals, diplomats and intelligence officers, the editors of leading
